Thursday, May 31, 2012

Commitment to learning : Sad state

One thing that has been worrying me for sometime and which I closely observe as a growing trend is the run-away attitude towards learning. People seek success but there is no commitment shown towards learning.
I come across people from various kind of roles in the society who seem to believe that faster track is to learn less. But somehow I have never been comfortable with the thought.
For Example I am citing a few thoughts I have heard or experienced recently from people across various roles when I talk about learning to them -

Students : The frequent questions are - Can I read the least and score the most? Why does it require me to learn if it will not add to my scoring at exams? Why do you wish me to read and re-read time and again? Are my paper degrees not sufficient enough?

Some of them who claim to undertake courses in various things do it just for the sake of formality rather than gaining any true knowledge about the same.

My worst experience on this was meeting some research scholars who are in process of doing PhD and have been registered as full time students for more than a year and who proudly say that they have not visited libraries and only read off net. They also claim innocence regarding knowledge regarding some of the great writers and authors or their works especially on their chosen topic of research.

New Joinee at work : Interest predominantly is on how quickly they can be deployed overseas or can have a direct customer / client facing role. They are just not ready to read / learn / practice more to gather more experiential facts and ability to manage any technical challenge or a difficult situation.

Employees with experience : When I am fine doing what I am doing and if my manager is happy, why should I learn new things? Why should I put in such time and effort? Being in good books of my manager will help me rather than my skills.

People in little more senior roles in organizations : Why should I bother? knowing just the terminology is sufficient enough. I have a team who should know such things with hands-on. They should be able to do work whenever needed.

These are states that really worry me at times about our future which is consistently becoming more and more technologically dependent and complicated.